If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly checking to see when a new Tesla Supercharger emerges either through the official Tesla Motors Supercharger page or the Interactive Tesla Supercharger Map listed here. This repeated and very manual act of checking got me thinking – What if I could somehow receive a real-time notification as Tesla Superchargers come online?
Even my best web searches returned no such method or app. that would report on real-time Tesla Supercharger notifications, so, I decided to create one myself.
[box type=”warning”]Warning: The contents to follow are extremely geeky and should only be attempted by trained professionals.
Tesla Supercharger Notification
Using a technique called web scraping, I decided to programmatically check results on the Tesla Motors Supercharger every hour and detect whether there’s been any new Tesla Superchargers added to the page.
Whenever a new addition is detected, the details will be immediately tweeted to @TeslaLiving. New Tesla Superchargers are stored within an internal database containing the name, location, link to the Superchargers' detail page and the date that the Supercharger was detected. This database will become more useful and fun to visualize overtime as more data gets collected and I begin graphing the results.
For the geeks out there that's interested in the tech stack - I used Python as the programming language, cron for the hourly/weekly checks, and a 3rd party Python library called Twython for handling the real-time tweets. The application runs on my Mac but it's platform agnostic.
I realize that this approach can be potentially brittle especially if and when Tesla changes the format of the Tesla Supercharger page, but that's something that can be easily updated within the app.
If you're interested in hearing about new Superchargers via your Twitter feed as Tesla posts them, feel free to follow me @Teslaliving. For now you'll be subject to my other Tweets but I promise to keep them all Tesla related.
Tesla Software Versions
The timing on when a Tesla software update occurs can make you crazy if you think about it too much. You'll often hear about it through the grapevine that so-and-so received the newest version of Tesla's software, but it can be days, weeks or even months before you receive yours.
Using an approach similar to my real-time Tesla Supercharger notification I created an email and twitter alert to detect when new versions of Tesla Software has been added to the forum community.
Next Steps
I have other ideas on how I can include other real-time notifications related to Tesla news and information, so stay tuned for more developments over time. Feel free to provide your ideas, requests and suggestions in the comments below!